Park Service to introduce new score card for parks

The National Park Service is revising a score card management tool to set funding priorities for parks, and will introduce a new version within several weeks, agency officials said Thursday.

The revised score card will use 33 metrics to place individual parks into one of four categories based on efficiency and performance, according to an April Park Service memorandum obtained by the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Parks that are deemed to use resources efficiently but are able to achieve only a low rating for overall performance, will be prioritized for increased funding, the memo said, noting that "theoretically, these parks consist of efficient operations that could effectively use new resources to improve performance." Parks that are both efficient and high-performing also could be rewarded, the memo said.

The Park Service described the tool as an asset that increases the transparency and credibility of the budget process, while acknowledging that its creation was driven by the emphasis the President's Management Agenda places on performance-based budgeting.

On the Office of Management and Budget's latest traffic-light-style management score card, the Interior Department, of which the Park Service is a part, was rated yellow for "mixed success" in the budget-performance integration category, while getting a good, or green, rating for progress in that area.

Park Service Comptroller Bruce Sheaffer said the agency's score card for parks is considered a prototype, in part because good measurements for some aspects of a successful park have been elusive. Law enforcement falls into that hard-to-measure category, he said, partly because common metrics for good urban practice do not carry over well to the park system.

By contrast, measures for park maintenance generally are better developed, he said. Thus any questions that arise with the score card output will continue to be resolved by discussions with officials in the field, he said.

The April memo also noted that raw scores for individual parks will be adjusted based on independent factors that make a park unique, such as age, population density, emphasis, climate, acreage or the number of full-time employees.

PEER, the group that obtained the memo, has been critical of the endeavor, describing the score card as "bureaucratic pretzel making" based on a "Rube Goldberg formula."

But Sheaffer disagreed. "You've got to think of it as just data that's been arranged in a way that can make it more useful for evaluating how one piece fits with the other," he said. "It's more that than some long, excruciating grinder that we put parks through."

Sheaffer said the score card has seen only partial application since an early version was rolled out last year because the Park Service's fiscal 2006 budget did not include the increases the score card was designed to address. Sheaffer said it is not used for allocation of existing parks money, which is generally similar from year to year with most marginal changes handled at the regional level.

Given the budget cuts facing the Park Service in ongoing fiscal 2007 budget negotiations, it seems unlikely the tool will be applied to prioritize funding increases soon. Sheaffer said it is also a useful tool for field managers to assess how the Washington office evaluates their locations, and how they stack up compared to other parks in their regions.

Are officials in the field glad to see the new tool, then? "It's easy for my folks here [in the Washington office], who work with statistics and their application all the time, to get on board," Sheaffer said. "But it's going to take some time to bring all the people in the field along."